Drivers of lexical processing and implications for early learning

A Borovsky - Annual review of developmental psychology, 2022 - annualreviews.org
Understanding words in unfolding speech requires the coordination of many skills to support
successful and rapid comprehension of word meanings. This multifaceted ability emerges …

The diversity of tone languages and the roles of pitch variation in non-tone languages: Considerations for tone perception research

CT Best - Frontiers in Psychology, 2019 - frontiersin.org
All languages employ consonants and vowels as discrete contrastive subcomponents of the
basic timing units of words (syllables). These two classes of phonemes are used to …

What can lexical tone training studies in adults tell us about tone processing in children?

M Antoniou, JLL Chin - Frontiers in psychology, 2018 - frontiersin.org
A growing number of studies on the acquisition of lexical tone by adult learners have
revealed that factors such as language background, musical experience, cognitive abilities …

Song and infant-directed speech facilitate word learning

W Ma, A Fiveash, EH Margulis… - Quarterly Journal of …, 2020 - journals.sagepub.com
Two separate lines of research have examined the influence of song and infant-directed
speech (IDS—a speech register that includes some melodic features) on language learning …

The roles of consonant, rime, and tone in mandarin spoken word recognition: an eye-tracking study

T Zou, Y Liu, H Zhong - Frontiers in Psychology, 2022 - frontiersin.org
This study investigated the relative role of sub-syllabic components (initial consonant, rime,
and tone) in spoken word recognition of Mandarin Chinese using an eye-tracking …

Children's decoding of emotional prosody in four languages.

W Ma, P Zhou, WF Thompson - Emotion, 2022 - psycnet.apa.org
It is well established that adults can interpret emotional speech prosody independent of
word meaning comprehension, even for emotional speech prosody in an unfamiliar …

The development of categorical perception of segments and suprasegments in Mandarin-speaking preschoolers

J Ma, J Zhu, Y Yang, F Chen - Frontiers in Psychology, 2021 - frontiersin.org
This study investigated the developmental trajectories of categorical perception (CP) of
segments (ie, stops) and suprasegments (ie, lexical tones) in an attempt to examine the …

Pitch perception in the first year of life, a comparison of lexical tones and musical pitch

A Chen, CJ Stevens, R Kager - Frontiers in Psychology, 2017 - frontiersin.org
Pitch variation is pervasive in speech, regardless of the language to which infants are
exposed. Lexical tone is influenced by general sensitivity to pitch. We examined whether the …

Constraints on tone sensitivity in novel word learning by monolingual and bilingual infants: tone properties are more influential than tone familiarity

D Burnham, L Singh, K Mattock, PJ Woo… - Frontiers in …, 2018 - frontiersin.org
This study compared tone sensitivity in monolingual and bilingual infants in a novel word
learning task. Tone language learning infants (Experiment 1, Mandarin monolingual; …

The influence of exemplar variability on young children's construal of verb meaning

W Ma, R Luo, R Golinkoff… - Language Learning and …, 2023 - Taylor & Francis
Verbs serve as the architectural centerpiece of sentences, making verb learning pivotal for
language acquisition. Verb learning requires both the formation of a verb-action map** …